AI labels are coming to Instagram and Facebook. Will they work?

Sir Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, announced Tuesday their platforms would begin labeling AI-generated images.

Meta is working with AI image generators like Midjourney and Shutterstock to add metadata to images that have been created by artificial intelligence, which will then automatically trigger a label when posted. Clegg framed it as a crucial safety measure and said the company would build the technology over the next year.

There are some drawbacks. First, the technology won’t work on video or audio yet, but Clegg says Meta will take down any unlabelled AI-generated clip that “creates a particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance.”

Second, even still images may be able to get around Meta’s detector by doing something as simple as processing it through photo editing software to generate new metadata, according to experts.

And as far as AI-generated text, Clegg says it would be pointless to try to identify and label it all. “That ship has sailed,” he told Reuters

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